Learning lessons and curbing criticism: Legitimizing involuntary resettlement and extractive projects in Mozambique

Since 2011, thousands of people have been resettled in the province of Tete, central Mozambique to make way for open-pit coal mines. These resettlements have received widespread criticism for impoverishing already vulnerable communities and for the repressive action taken against local opposition. This repression is part of a broader array of reactions “from above” that have emerged in relation to protest. One of these reactions “from above” is that representatives of the government of Mozambique and extractive multinational companies increasingly address resettlement in Tete as a process to learn lessons from. These lessons learning practices legitimize future resettlement processes elsewhere, particularly in relation to a highly valued project of liquid natural gas (LNG) extraction in northern Mozambique. Moreover, this approach results in the de-facto co-optation of environmentalist non-governmental organizations (NGOs), whose agendas and funding possibilities are also increasingly tuned towards learning lessons from “Tete” to improve future resettlement elsewhere. Meanwhile, the opposition of those affected by resettlement in Tete is losing resonance, allowing the coal mining companies to continue with business as usual. The data presented in this article is derived from observations made during government-organized national conferences on resettlement in November 2016 and 2018, and additional ethnographic fieldwork over the course of 2016 and 2017 in Maputo and Tete. I take these conferences as a starting point to analyze the politics of evaluation, the legitimization of displacement for extractive projects, and the co-optation of criticism.